I have taught a similar workshop in Calgary last year, and the image below shows our workshop group at one of the shooting locations, including photo assistants Hajo (My Dad) and Richard. And I am in there as well.

We had students travel from as far as Scottsdale, San Francisco and Winnipeg. A big thanks again to everyone who came out! It was great meeting so many nice and enthusiastic photographers!

For today’s ‘From RAW to FINAL’, I wanted to share how I worked on one image I took during the workshop, and how I gave it its final look.

The image above shows my ‘setup’ for taking the shot of an old barn. I used a Phase One medium format digital back. The final image was a panorama assembled from 2 images and then cropped to a ‘double square’ aspect ratio of 1:2. I liked the old barn but also wanted to incorporate the winding road, whch made for an interesting leading line.

The image above shows how I merged multiple images to a single Panorama using Autopano Pro Software.

Next, I am cropping the panorama that Autopano Pro generated to my desired aspect ratio of 1:2 or the ‘double square’. The resulting image has over 45 megapixel, thanks to using the Phase One Camera. I can make huge prints from this file!

I use Silver Efex Pro 2 Software to convert to black and white. This can be done in Photoshop as well, but I get amazing results in much less time with Silver Efex. Above you can see how the ‘simple’ black and white above was transformed into a more dramatic black and white image using the tools available in Silver Efex 2 Software.

You can download a free trial and if you’re doing lots of black and white conversions I am convinced you will love this software!

For my workflow I like tweaking what Silver Efex generates in Photoshop. This let’s me have ultimate control and fine-tune my images even more.

There you have it. Let me know what you think and don’t be shy to ask questions about the workflow above.